Click here to read part 3 and there to read parts 2 and 1 and then you’ll be all caught up.
Brown Sugar. (Photo by Tom)
At the start of the weekend, we’d gone out to the Georgia Aquarium on our own, Tom, Matt and I. It was a short walk down a steep hill from the hotel. Matt had gotten the jump-start while Tom went to see something else and meet me later, which made it hard as hell trying to find him when we got there because this place, big enough as it is, was swarming with tourists and the jazz band playing in the atrium made it hard to hear anyone on a cell phone. I haven’t been to many bona fide aquariums, other than whatever Sea World in Orlando might have had going on in the late 80s, the one in Virginia Beach where Phil got violently sick, and the missable one in DC housed in the basement of the Commerce Building. The one in Atlanta is next door to the World of Coca-Cola, or what I consider to be the headquarters of incessant reminders of the soft drink that you’ll find all around the city as though its founder cured cancer. A gigantic model of a Coca-Cola bottle, which doesn’t look so impressive in the daytime — shines in neon green and a wash of changing colors in the middle — is enclosed in a glass column towards the entrance of the building. It may or may not be a distress signal for superheroes on the Coca-Cola payroll, there were no notable disasters with which we could test this theory.